From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 13:05:30 MDT
weidai@weidai.com (Wei Dai) writes:
>Here's where Robin Hanson's futarchy idea (see his post earlier today)
>comes in. Establish betting markets, three for each person, on whether
>that person will attempt an attack, whether he will succeed, and how many
>casualties the attack will cause. Then apply a rule based on the asset
>prices in these markets. Assuming that these markets cannot be easily
>manipulated, this should be a much more efficient way to deal with
>terrorism.
How many markets do you expect to have? It's hard to accept the assumption
that they're hard to manipulate if there are a large number of them (which
probably prevents them from having much liquidity) and much of the relevant
info is kept secret by the government, or the market suspects that it is
being kept secret.
Futarchy would be quite valuable for broad policy decsions, but it's not
obvious that it would be valuable for frequent decisions of the kind an
individual policeman makes. I'd suggest a better way to use futarchy to
handle the problems you mention is to use it to evaluate better methods
of insuring that an unbiased grand jury will quickly review any arrest.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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